If I am prepared to turn my head a few degrees in any direction I can see the time from pretty much anywhere. Apart from impressing your friends by wearing a Patek Philippe or some such, I don't really understand why people wear watches anymore.

I suppose you've never met a shift-worker with a dual-time watch where the second display is set to 07:00 on waking so that one doesn't forget to each lunch when the real-world strikes 03:00.

I suppose you don't operate a stop-watch by feel and sound and habit when driving around town to determine the most efficient routes (is it even legal to fumble with your phone's stop-watch application?)

I suppose you've never forgotten to pack your phone's charge cable, or taken a vacation to some remote place where leaving behind your phone and phone's charger is considered a wise idea.

I suppose you've never got your hands covered with some kind of horrible construction adhesive while working on the construction of an out-building that isn't even wired for power yet.

I suppose, in general, you don't get out much. I've coined my own term for this condition: use-case blindness. But you do seem to read the advertisements for status bling in magazines left lying around in your local coffee shop, so you must get out at least a little bit.

It all happens an inch at a time. And make no mistake, it'll happen here too.

Before informing us with your trademark wisdom that rain arrives in droplets and not sheets, may I suggest you get yourself a username? If you're only AC because you're short on ideas, I doubt "putsch" is taken. The +1 funny mods will swell your karma, inch by inch, make no mistake.

What is substance "zuckerberg" anyway, and why does it so frequently show up among people who can't even multitask two fingers?

HIV is "already everywhere". So too was slavery. "Already everywhere" is the pragmatism of the damned.

Seen the profits Apple is making from phones? Apple won the game a long time ago.

One word: Commoditized.

But wait, there's more. The market has a word for game over: Sell.

Or in the prosaic language of the street: Sell Now!

Apple will be very fortunate if Samsung succeeds in turning this market into a functional duopoly. A duopoly usually signifies that there's No Shiny left, so let the milking begin.

The Higgs boson is a good model here. There was a flurry of discoveries between the 1950s and the 1970s. Sandwiched between major discoveries in 1983 and 2012 all they managed to discover was the top quark—if one classifies new forms of quarkonium as an incremental refresh and not really new particles at all. What comes after the Higgs boson? I doubt there will be any interesting Higgsonia, much less a Higgs boson S.

Face facts man: The accessible regions of the Standard Model energy spectra are pretty much tapped out.

I suspect the next New Shiny will be body invasive. But don't you worry—Apple has a filed a brief with the FDA to revise their oversight structures to become conducive to the thunderbolt cadence required to exploit the ever-narrowing profit window associated with each New Shiny category cataclysm. For nine glorious months, they'll need supertankers to summon their profit stream before Huawei Cyba-Gadgee eats their lunch.

Unfortunately, after the body-invasive iteration, the next New Shiny is halfway to the Planck scale. If they have good business heads, they will presciently disburse their profits to their shareholders, wind themselves down, and call it a good run.

I remember a decade ago when people were always debating the next "killer ap". Well, we found it. It was AdBlock.

I just spent two hours reading about crazy people destroying their livers to increase their mental capacity by 10% (I doubt it's more than that from the spelling errors). Why? One can get as much boost (at least during your Internet time) from any good ad-blocking program with no damage to your liver at all.

If the mountain of crap won't stay away from Muhammad then Muhammad must stay away from the mountain of crap.

I've also been on Shaw since pretty much continuously since the first month they offered service, and I live in one of the first cities activated. Yes, about 14 years. Haven't used their email or web services since the first year.

I had one incident with Shaw which was very annoying. An OpenBSD firewall just suddenly stopped working with no change on my part. If just the firewall accessed the internet, it worked normally. But as soon a NAT client relayed traffic through the firewall concurrently, responses from the Shaw head-end would cease to arrive, for about 30 seconds. If I had ping running, I'd seen 30 ping packets go out, then all of sudden 30 pink packet responses, then maybe a few other packets, then another 30 second hiatus. Who knows, maybe I had something unorthodox in my pf configuration about handling all the background arp chatter. I had only ever aspired to "works for me" with my pf configuration.

The Shaw technician determined that the problem was customer premise equipment by showing that routing my service into a Mac with no firewall present worked just fine. The network trace showing their head-end buffering 30 seconds worth of ping responses and then blurping them back in a packet noogie didn't strike him as a hinting toward an anomaly with their own administration.

This had happened once before for a week or so, and then suddenly cleared itself up with no intervention on my part. The next time it was permanent.

I didn't feel like fighting with them or with messing with my firewall configuration, so I ordered Telus as a backup, and that worked perfectly with my firewall without changing anything. While I had both services, I observed that Shaw is fundamentally superior. You don't see this in data rates (not often) but you do see this whenever you're surfing the web with a big download running in background. Telus gets very chunky. I was banned by a family member from downloading anything on our Telus connection during a remote session to the office. Shaw has tiny lurches, too, but you almost don't notice them. This whole problem, likely having something to do with buffer bloat, has become progressively worse (not better) over the last 14 years, with the biggest uptick in chunkiness right around the time Netflix became popular.

Telus is also a vastly more irritating company to deal with. Don't even get me started, I could go for a week.

Shaw is no angel, but over the term of my experience, they've about as enlightened and as reliable as any ISP on the planet. There's no such thing as an ISP that never pisses anyone off.

However, by some miracle of economics, I'm now paying more for essentially the same service than I was 14 years ago. I was a heavy user then. Good grief, I downloaded 100 megabyte service patches over dial-up the year before Shaw offered broadband. Now that 100MB patch is 700MB ISO, so there has been usage inflation, yet hardly outstripping technological progress. Somehow in the telecoms industry, economies of scale run contrary to every other field of economic endeavor.

The Shaw email outage is a brutal error, but I wouldn't trade Shaw for 90% of the other ISPs out there, not without a gun to my head. This is easier for me to say having the wits to set myself apart from ISP email services 13 years ago. This also made it easier to switch pipes when I did experience my Shaw difficulties.

Note that my PF problems went away when I rebuilt my ruleset from scratch on a FreeBSD server that replaced my old OpenBSD firewall, when time permitted me to mess with this.

I'm sure it was a case where something unusual in my configuration triggered a bug in how the service was configured on their side. Shaw is not the kind of ISP that digs into anomalies even if you shove the packet trace right in their face. Maybe after this email thing boils over, they'll get religion on pursuing those small anomalies people were noticing a week before one final fault routed all their received email into the giant bit bucket.

Track stars aren't the only athletes in this world. My brain hits the gym for at least three hours every day, rain or shine, and this goes back since peewee league.

Just imagine that the athlete lives in a world where all the food is available free of charge, but in order for the restaurants to stay in business, they depend on customers gobbling down free Mars bars from giant bowls placed just inside the entrance. Turns out there's some kind of additive in the Mars bars that influences a person's future behaviour in some way that accrues profit to somebody who actually pays for the manufacture and distribution (including the free food subsidy) of all those Mars bars. But let's ignore that.

What's an athlete supposed to do? If you don't eat the Mars bar, you're cheating the proprietor. If you do eat the Mars bar, kiss your athletic excellence good fucking by.

Well, I've invested about half my conscious life over the four and a half decades since I reached the age of making my own decisions to keeping my brain relatively unburdened by the coagulating poison of cultural cholesterol.

There was a year in my teens where I became depressed about my schooling (where the only learning involved knowing when and discovering how to avoid my toxic schoolmates). During this year I watched a lot of stupid television. Then I came to my senses and said "Why the fuck am I wasting my life and destroying my brain?"

I haven't subscribed to cable TV as an adult ever since. All you have is this tiny gasket between your brain--your second favourite organ--and any damn infomercial filth included in your basic service whether you want it or not. At 3:00 a.m. after a bad day and not being able to sleep this tiny gasket fails you. You thumb twitches once to change the channel, but not immediately twelve more times to change the channel to anything a sane person would consider worth watching. For some people, this gasket blows out completely, and it fails them before they've even finished their breakfast.

I'll dump my ad-blocker just as soon as society puts a restraining order on cognitive filth, and not one minute sooner. Of course, everyone has their own personal definition of cognitive filth. Like everyone else, I'll register my views on the official Cognitive Filth Restraint Registry. But then, like any athlete, my list of banned foods will be longer than most.

Words to live by: If you won't put it into your body, don't put it into your mind. Not even if someone else pockets a nickel in the exchange.

Try walking down a bad part of Newark or Chicago some time.

Try swabbing a teenager's festering zit, and I guarantee you'll be joining angry rallies to support "tough on zit" politicians in favour of dumping metric buck tonnes of antibiotics into the drinking water supply to eradicate the entirety of the human microbiome.

Cherry pick much? The festering zit of American inner cities was not built in a day, and involved countless firm handshakes of well dressed men behind closed doors. A crime ghetto provides cheap, captive labour, and with only a little pruning from the prison-industrial complex, the contagion is easily managed (the dangerous loss-making portion of this activity falls on the public payroll, while the relatively safe profitable portion has now been devolved to the private sector; this being the most excellent business model of all time, and eliciting of the firmest handshakes behind closed doors that ever a man did see).

All I really wanted to do when I fired up my phosphorous pencil was to give the story submission a major boot up the ass for writing "can tell".

From Eliza, Part 3:

Weizenbaumâ(TM)s reaction to all of this has become almost as famous as the Eliza program itself. When he saw people like his secretary engaging in lengthy heart-to-hearts with Eliza, it ... well, it freaked him the hell out. The phenomenon Weizenbaum was observing was later dubbed "the Eliza effect" by Sherry Turkle, which she defined as the tendency âoeto project our feelings onto objects and to treat things as though they were people.â In computer science and new media circles, the Eliza effect has become shorthand for a userâ(TM)s tendency to assume based on its surface properties that a program is much more sophisticated, much more intelligent, than it really is. Weizenbaum came to see this as not just personally disturbing but as dangerous to the very social fabric, an influence that threatened the ties that bind us together and, indeed, potentially threatened our very humanity.

[Yet again Slashcode shows off its awe-inspiring Unicode chops, to the eternal embarrassment of geeks everywhere.]

Here we have yet another invocation to the mystical appeal of any parameter written down or displayed on screen, however TOTALLY BOGUS as noticed and investigated in NINETEEN SIXTY SIX.

"Can tell" is listed as a useful synonym for "barfs up" only in The Dictionary of Hemorrhoid Self-Expression and Intimidation of Rubes.

I can tell I'm entering the downhill slope of old age. I'm regressing now to ALL CAPS.

"Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement.

I've been on /. for a long time, and I've never understood the persistence of "fast enough" fallacy busters. The phrase is not intended to mean "wouldn't take it even if it was given to me". Duh!

Right now I've got two systems behind my desk. I'm mainly working on the box that's a little bit slower because I can't be bothered to swap the hard drives (both cases are identical with removable drive trays). So if the word "enough" has any potential to express attitude whatsoever, I'd say—with no fear of lapsing into fallacy—that my slower processor is presently "fast enough".

WTF is so threatening about the word "enough"? It's not an absolute decree about all purposes for all time. It's a summary of general sentiment that pressing concerns lie elsewhere. Do you lump all sentiment under fallacy? Wow. Fascinating.

There is a simple separation between art and the artist.

If I were reviewing one of his novels, I wouldn't pay the least attention to his toxic views on homosexual marriage, unless it's there in the book. I would be happy to write: This is a fabulous book written by a mid-grade asshole. Your call. I'm not advocating that anyone else boycott his lame ass on my behalf. I have myself borrowed two of Card's books from the library because I respect his contributions to the genre.

On my own account, I'm sure as hell not forking over so much as loose change from under the sofa cushion to purchase anything the man has written. His views on gay marriage are toxic squared. Now if I were the artist (and this is a prospect I'm seriously considering in a mid-life fit of career suicide) I have no problem with gay marriage bigots boycotting financial support of my endeavors. (I'm generally opposed to winner-take-all market dynamics in the first place. If some moral market Balkanization would slow the Amazon borgship down, I'm all for it.)

Seriously, what's toxic about Card is failing to distinguish marriage as a social institution from marriage as a deeply personal institution: a commitment by two people to stand by each other. I don't give a damn if the later is redefined as civil union, so long as it entitles those who enter into it to all the traditional secular spousal benefits: insurance, primary beneficiary, power of attorney, etc.

If Card had an honest bone in his body, he'd document his views on the entitlements of civil union. Tell us, do we still need a revolution if the government endorses civil union as the secular equivalent of metaphysically sanctioned procreative marriage?

No, he just grabs onto marriage in its guise as a social institution as if there's no other reasonable claim.

He also conveniently assumes there's no such thing as a heterosexual person who wouldn't have been happier in a gay relationship except for some adverse childhood influence. No wonder all the identity regret flows in a single direction, when the countervailing direction is defined as zero by aggressive logical neglect. I have heard of people leaving straight relationships for the other side, but not yet have I heard a story where the heterosexual phase was attributed to sexual abuse (as opposed to moral abuse). With the moral abuse so pervasive, and far easier to talk about—among the people who aren't actively advocating toxic views—it's hardly surprising the "deflected into normalcy by sexual abuse" category is rarely run up the flag pole.

Apparently he never got the memo on secular democracy. He's living in a country alongside a lot of people who actively reject metaphysical first claim, and far more who passively distance themselves from the bullshit, without bestowing upon themselves any inconvenient social labels.

America is constitutionally a secular democracy. Religion in America is an aggressively individual freedom. A clarifying essay by Card on the errors of the founding fathers would also be welcome. Why doesn't he just admit he believes he's actively insurgent against the original framing of American democracy? That would double my respect for his views, right there.

Really, what need did he have to take up the subject in the first place? How was it his issue? Because when you're religious, it's all your business? How sick is that?

Have you ever considered that he is making a ridiculous point on purpose?

He's a Republican, isn't he? Usually the purpose of a Republican saying ridiculous things is to drown out a more useful dialogue. It's an old, old playbook, that usually boils down to this:

Human potential causes acid rain.

Nothing contributes more CO2 that a citizen of a wealthy industrial state living a long and healthy and prosperous life. So there's an equally valid paraphrase:

Wealth causes acid rain.

Potentially, wealth also cures acid rain. Moral of the story: Sticking a pin into a complex system and crying out that the sky is falling is for assholes and idiots and power brokers of public distraction.

He was an excellent salesman, certainly fallible, and with a well-earned reputation for his RDF. However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!

That Steve "knew what people wanted" is practically exhibit A concerning his RDF.

With the original Mac, he provided a vision of what computing might soon become, well before it was actually usable for anything serious. I had the original fat Mac and briefly tried to develop on it. My compiler required heavy use of the second floppy disk drive and a third floppy disk, in a fairly predictable pattern, though not to my Mac, which invariably auto-magically popped out the wrong floppy. There was of course no way to override this behaviour, or even manually pop out the disk you wished to replace without resorting to the bent paperclip. Fucker. I had a big pile of bent paper clips before I came to my senses and bought the cheapest damn XT clone I could find with 640KB and a 10MB hard drive. Nirvana! The whole XT machine cost me roughly the same amount as it would have to upgrade my fat Mac to accept an internal hard drive.

Q: Why do computers have to be so complicated?
A1: They don't, so be cool.
A2: So that people who know what they are doing can get real work done on hardware that remains lamentably inadequate, so that some day we can make computers that work so damn well on the inside, simplicity of use follows automatically.

(People do still recall that the expansion nightmare of the IBM PC was primarily due to IBM deliberately using a brain-damaged slot design, so as not to compete with anything useful and far more expensive? As with many things IBM attempts to accomplish, they succeeded beyond their wildest dream. Their only mistake was underestimating the Taiwanese.)

But anyways, this Mac junket doubles down on his status as visionary, even though the only innovation involved was taking what Xerox had first invented and layering on the emasculation (e.g. the floppy disk I couldn't manually eject, the single button mouse with no context menu for any fidget, and the global menu bar that permanently locked into place the assumption that no personal computer would ever sport two large screens).

Jobs soon realized that the kind of customer willing to pay a stupidly large premium for the same basic capability were the kind of people willing to delegate control for consistency. This worked for Steve, since he valued control from the get go. (Woz valued flexibility, or the original slots would never have happened.)

Copland was to be followed by Gershwin, which promised protected memory spaces and full preemptive multitasking. The operating system was intended to be a complete re-write of the Mac OS, and Apple hoped to beat Microsoft Windows 95 to market with a development cycle of just one year. The Copland development was hampered by countless missed deadlines. The release date was first pushed back to the end of 1995, then to mid-'96, late '96, and finally to the end of 1997. With a dedicated team of 500 software engineers and an annual budget of $250 million, Apple executives began to grow impatient with the project continually falling behind schedule.

Jobs was gone at this point, but his fixation on removing floppy disk drive buttons rather than laying the fundamentals for demand paged virtual memory nearly killed Apple before he could rush back to save it. I recall servicing my brother's top of the line Mac in mid 2000. It was all of two years old. I determined that his two favorite applications couldn't be run at full capability at the same time, because those fancy Gershwin promises were still MIA, and not a single extra anything could be usefully upgraded in hardware (it already had a turbo CPU board).

While at NeXT, Jobs came to the epiphany that people wanted something that actually worked. I won't hold it against the man that he couldn't learn from his past mistakes.

It wasn't until he finally grafted the Apple skin on the the NeXT bones that Apple had a product that legitimately appealed to more than a niche market (astutely, they had always cultivated a well-heeled niche market, but even this left them just a c-hair from going augmented hipster tits up).

Then the PC market gave way to a gadget market and genius was born. After only 25 years in gestation! Without the gadget transition, Apple (and Jobs) would be remembered as nothing more than an overpriced boutique with a cult following.

Unlike Steve, Brin isn't going to need to pull off a Hail Mary to be remembered well for his early accomplishments. It pains me to see him spouting drivel, but one can always hope he's just cynically impedance matching himself in a public forum to the next quarterly shareholders' call.

I've been running a voice recorder for several hours per day for about a year now. Much of this is deliberate narration, but sometimes I just let it run. I usually let it run when I'm doing chores, making kit wines, or just driving around in case any ideas come into my brain (the device is fixed to the dash, which is legal in Canada).

There are many ways to dip back into this archive without having to replay my life in real time. Periodically I just listen to something randomly selected from my main folder (these recordings tend to be free of me typing some screed for half an hour). My recorder has a pretty good automatic silence suppression mode (Sony refers to this feature as VOR for "voice operated recording"), but this tends not to work with keyboard noise. It's plenty interesting to perform a somewhat unbiased review of events from a month or three distant in the recent past. My recorder also has an accelerated playback mode (intelligible at faster speeds than low quality accelerators) and it will also pitch shift. I usually shift my voice down a tone and listen at about 1.6x. With the VOR often eliminating half of the recording time (the pause between sentences if you are really thinking about what you're saying), this represents about a 3x replay speed compared to the original recording session. On a half hour walk, I can review 1.5 hours of heavy thinking.

There are also many cases where I just want to know something about what I was up to on a particular day in the past. As soon as you dip into any part of the recording near the target time, memories begin to return. It really doesn't take very long to narrow it down to the specific recording.

Additionally, my recorder has a "track mark" button. I push this whenever something of particular interest is said or recorded. I can skip from mark to mark very quickly. It can take all of 30 seconds to sample ten marks on a two hour recording session, and glean a rough table of contents. When I listen to any recording, I usually make keyboard notes about anything where I've had a fresh reaction.

What I've discovered with the track marks is that any session where I get into deep thinking I'll tend to leave four or more marks on the recording. I can use the mark count as a pretty good indication of which recordings are the most focused. On a long recording, I often sign off by adding a tick mark near the end and then summarizing what I've just dictated, and what I was happy with, if anything. Most recordings with a tick mark within 60s of the end of the recording actually end with such an epilogue.

All of my primary folder recordings are voice recognition quality. My recorder was awarded six dragons by Nuance for use with Dragon Naturally Speaking. I don't use this. I'm hoping to find a workable speech recognition package for Linux or BSD at some point, and convert my archive retrospectively. The dross is all converted to Opus. The content rich recordings are also preserved in 320 kbps MP3 (the recording mode I mainly use, though I'm not sure it gets all six Dragons).

It's ridiculous to think you can't dip into a life store partially, and less than we dip into the Internet partially. It's a bit like the Internet back in 1993. Even before AltaVista I could usually find stuff with a modest amount of effort. Most subject areas had a least one guy maintaining a decent link farm. There were list-serves that aggregated the most useful FAQs and primers. There was Archie. And *gasp* there was Gopher, too, the lastest of all last resorts.

My voice recording archive is way better than Gopher, and not all that much worse than the old AltaVista.

It might just work for me, however. My thinking is deeply thematic. I keep returning to the same rock face time and again with different insights and vantage points. I get a kind of continuity out of this process that matters to me. Can hardly imagine living without it.

There is, however, very little of any social interaction with anyone else. I generally don't feel comfortable recording others.